Appendix:

Occupational Matching

Conclusions

The addition of occupational matching to regional accessibility analysis can add considerable richness to the findings. In the current case, it helped to demonstrate differences in accessibility that were not apparent from a generalized accessibility analysis.

The technique does suffer from some limitations. For example:

• Occupational matching requires more detailed employment data than is typically developed in regional modeling; therefore, the most recent census data must be used. It must further be assumed that the proportion of employment and residents by occupation in each zone remains constant in the future.
  
• It is difficult to incorporate a comparison of transit versus highway accessibility into the analysis. Because accessibility measures opportunities rather than actual trips between origin-destination pairs, the authors concluded that there was no basis for stratifying the analysis by highway versus transit travel.

A future research topic is to develop alternatives to standard gravity-based measures of accessibility. Particularly important is to stratify accessibility indicators along socioeconomic and other qualitative dimensions. While residents of a neighborhood might be close to a lot of job opportunities, this accessibility is meaningful only if they have the skills or education to qualify for those jobs.

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